2018 Scholarship Submissions

Write an essay where you tell us what test preparation practices work best for you and why.

I get distracted quite easily. I'm the type of guy who will be walking to class and will stop for a good minute to see what that funny, cute little squirrel is doing. So, preparing for tests I have to put my phone on airplane mode and in my backpack so that the temptation to be distracted isn't even there. And once I am in the zone, I am in. the. zone. I study until I feel my stomach screaming at me, "you need food!" Or until I need to go to the bathroom. Whichever one of those comes first. I also do not study in groups, because it might go good at the beginning and we will be bouncing ideas off of each other like we are the grown up versions of Little Einsteins, but eventually we will get off track and go down a rabbit hole like Alice in Wonderland. We enter into an altered state of reality . But no, I study by myself at our school's library with my phone set on airplane mode and in my backpack. Now, you might be asking, "why don't you study in your dorm room if you get distracted easily? Why not be all by yourself?" I'm glad you asked. I study at the library and not in my dorm room because, I watched a youtube video titled, "What every college freshman needs to know," and in it it said that studying in your dorm room, hurts your efforts because it is where you sleep and where your mind is trained to think that it is its "chill spot." But when you go to study at a certain place just for studying, your mind kind of enters study mode. I think that's actually really cool, and almost makes me excited about studying thinking, my brain is about to enter intense studying mode when I walk into this building. And it really does. And the best part about the way I study is that I tell myself that if I study for over 4 hours (checking the time before I go to the library because I am not allowed to look at my phone), I deserve some sort of sweet something. So at the end of most of my test preparation study sessions, I get some ice cream or cookies. What better way to study?